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How Apple Got Everything Right By Doing Everything Wrong
An anonymous reader writes "Wired has a look at how the good and bad of Apple, their Yin and Yang, have come together to form a company that actually works. The piece looks at Steve Jobs' unusual and abrasive management style, otherwise known as 'Management Techniques From the Dark Side'. It's essentially a list of counterintuitive, suspicious-seeming and downright evil management techniques that work - for them."
Given that most managerial types are ignorant tools whose rise to power is typically fuelled by a mediocre knowledge of PowerPoint and Project, its a no brainer that to succeed, be agile, and come up with good products, you simply do everything that 'traditional' techniques says to avoid.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
After reading that I felt the way people looked after watching the movie 'swordfish' in the theaters. A profound WTF? look on their faces as they left the theater. Like him or not, Steve has managed to do what others have not. In business, if you're making money they call that 'doing it right'.
Dr Spok told millions of Americans the 'right' way to raise their kids. Turns out he got rich doing it wrong too. According to the investors, Apple is doing it right, management style be damned. I don't even like Apple products but they appeal to a certain percentage of the world in a way that makes them popular. I fail to see how that is doing it wrong.
Ms Spears is doing it wrong but Steve seems to have a pretty firm grip on the clue bat.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
Agreed.
My favorite bit from skimming it: "even WIRED got it wrong" (referring to telling Apple to get out of the hardware business).
This from the magazine whose cover story was "The Long Boom" the month that the internet bubble burst.
Wired hardly ever gets anything right (not entirely its fault, since it makes lots of predictions), but still.
No joke, I wish my mod points hadn't expired. This really is some twisted shit. This seems par for the course lately from Wired. They have been publishing absolute garbage lately. Air Force blocks blocks and other sites and suddenlty something that is an industry best practice for security becomes censorship?
I also noticed that the people bitching about Jobs were "former" employees. Well holy shit...someone who left or was fired is going to bitch about their former boss for some media facetime? This is a 5 page article?!
And maybe I didn't read enough, but "micromanaging" has nothing to do with demanding exacting detail from the output. Anyone who calls that micromanaging has NEVER been micromanaged and its an insult to anyone who has suffered through a real micromanaging boss.
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
The author seems blissfully unaware of Apple's free software use. GCC, Darwin, Khtml and what not punch a few large holes in their central thesis.
I don't think you can call the iPod a reliable result of make'em bleed management style. Yes, it can and did happen. But I doubt as likely as under a more open system.
Another company that used to work that way was Palm. Their flagship pilot was built to be something that the CEO would to carry around with him. There is a well-known story about him getting a block of wood cut which would fit in his jacket pocket and giving it to the designers as a maximum size for the device.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
They may produce products that people want, but that doesn't mean working there is a good experience. I'm guessing that there's alot of voluntary Kool-Aid drinking done by the employees to coninve themselves that the hostile working environment is what it takes to succeed. Also, see "stockholm syndrome" for the workplace.
I've worked for an Apple supplier, and it's a bit creepy to have someone take mug shot of you because "Mr. Jobs wants to know what you look like." Not as creepy as getting a phone call at home late at night because they want hand-holding, but creepy.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Say what you like about Steve Jobs. But he has _taste_.
:).
;).
If CxOs are thinking of being the "the red-faced, tyrannical boss" they better not forget that important point. They're not going to do much good if they do the tyrannical part without the taste part. In fact to emulate Apple I bet the tyrannical part is optional, the taste part isn't[1]. And the taste part is _hard_ to emulate.
Jobs knows the difference between good and great. Whereas most CxOs (or people in general) can't even seem to tell the difference between good and bad
The typical committee might take weeks to tell you whether a piece of chocolate tastes good or not, much less even get around to the way it _looks_.
The Techs? Many of the good ones might come with great _technical_ architectures and designs - but when the customer looks at it and tries to use it, it IS a piece of crap from their PoV.
So even if the Techs at Apple don't like his abusive micromanagement, I bet they _respect_ it because Steve Jobs has taste.
They can be confident that even if he's deciding on the "curve of a monitor's corners":
1) The decision is based on making an "insanely great"[2] product (not a crony richer, or more powerful)
2) He is 90% likely to be right about what the market will like.
3) If he yells at you, it's not _just_ because he's an asshole, deep down you know know he is right - that what you just showed him is only suitable as "blah stuff" from Dell...
Many (not all) techs can accept assholes who are right most of the time.
Thing is I wonder whether it's a bit like abused spouse syndrome for them
[1] That said, I think a lot of people with taste AND an obsessive eye for detail tend to get very upset when stuff misses the mark.
[2] Yes I know their products aren't really insanely great.
They made it pretty. They made it look clean. They made it look like a decoration, not a tool.
PC enthusiasts see their PCs as classic muscle cars. They like to work on them themselves, show power (for less cost), and use it for utility and entertainment.
Apple enthusiasts see their PCs as cute little pets. They like to show them off. They can do tasks for which the Apple was bred, but not much else-- but that's OK because Apple enthusiasts by their computers to serve specific purposes.
I don't use the word "organic" because you can't explain what it means. But everyone understands SMOOTH! I use a 24" iMac in a Windows office. People come to me for tasks, and I perform them before their eyes using tools which make it look SMOOTH. It makes me look like I'm magic(al). Exposé, Spaces, Stacks, CoverFlow all make the same tasks that Windows does look SMOOTH. I also run Parallels for IE6 testing, RDC to reach my server, and if I get wicked, I BOOT CAMP into VISTA!!!
Plus I have a machine that is running the same chips and the same apps (Word, InDesign, PShop) as they are, and it's smoother, faster, quieter, larger, thermally cooler and looks great dominating my desk. Take a look at Dell's "The One" and see precisely why Apple succeeded.
The CEO who forced Jobs out wrote an autobiography and mentioned all of the mistakes Jobs wanted to make, how they were such terrible ideas. Jobs gets back into the company years later and does those very things and now Apple is an immense success again. It amazes me how sound logic and reason can sometimes be so wrong. "Stick to the knitting" is usually good advice because businesses typically go to shit when they try to expand into markets they know nothing about and refuse to hire people who do know the market to manage those divisions. My last died doing the same kind of stuff, the boss has a dozen side projects on his plate and he's ignoring the business' main money-making division.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Quite possibly the reason only former employees ever comment is because the current ones are terrified of their boss.
I disagree. Industrial design is a big part of it, and not so much technology as engineering. People don't go for OSX because it's BSD, they go for it because it's pretty, and because shit just works. The latter sounds simple, but is extremely hard to pull off-- it requires total vertical control, and the willingness in upper management to enforce a high standard. BSD was just one of the possible ways to meet this high standard, that Apple felt was best.
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
Indeed. There's a lot that just doesn't follow in the article, for example: "It's hard to see how any of this would have happened had Jobs hewed to the standard touchy-feely philosophies of Silicon Valley. Apple creates must-have products the old-fashioned way: by locking the doors and sweating and bleeding until something emerges perfectly formed. It's hard to see the Mac OS and the iPhone coming out of the same design-by-committee process that produced Microsoft Vista or Dell's Pocket DJ music player."
Microsoft is notorious for driving employees hard. There's a plethora of books like "Microserfs"... there's nothing "touchy-feely" about them. And Bill Gates was also notorious for micromanaging development... often to the final product's detriment. And don't forget, the Macintosh itself started out as an underground project that Jobs opposed at first.
Jobs has good points and bad points. Success doesn't mean that you have to assume the bad points are suddenly good.
Yes, pretty is a part of it, but "because shit just works" is a far greater part of the equation for most people, in my experience.
And to whom do people turn, when they're considering getting a new computer and they want to know which particular brand of shit just works the best? The same kind people who switched to Macs in droves a few years back, solely because of OS X. Such solicited recommendations have been the driving force behind Mac sales among most of my friends.
Well, yes and no: Apple is more a hardware packager than maker, since it now just takes utterly standard components and puts them together. At one point it used unusual chips, had its own peripheral standard, etc., so Apple has taken many of the suggestions from others and conformed itself more to standard PCs.
In addition, it's not clear whether Apple would be even more successful if it licensed its operating system to other companies willing to make less expensive boxes.
I run various Linux distros professionally, so I'm well aware of what is possible with Ubuntu. ... The fact that a skilled nerd can make some of these apps work under Ubuntu is no more interesting than the fact that a skilled nerd can run OSX on his Dell.
Same feelings here, I have a split OSX/Linux household and you really can't compare the "fit and finish" of the two operating systems. Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love what has been done with Linux in recent years, however the days of using Apple-EVERYTHING and only staring at flying toasters for entertainment are long gone.
I totally love what Ubuntu has made possible for people for no cost, but it DOES still take a geek to make the advanced stuff happen. Linux is the best for starting from scratch and getting to a HTML browser or email access. Adding Office compatibility beyond OO.org (yes, some people need more) takes a bit more time but is certainly possible.
My opinions on the recent surge in Apple success (14% of PC sales in the last month is a "surge" to be sure) have more to do with Vista than anything else. Just the other night I was messing around with a Vista install to see if I could make any sort of worthwhile Media Center out of it (a true critic should try and try again), and it hit me. Vista is SO unlike XP that one is essentially learning a new operating system, with at least an idea of what it should be. If Microsoft changes things so much that we're having to learn something entirely new, why not try something else? Learning OSX was, honestly, easier than learning Vista.
In addition, it's not clear whether Apple would be even more successful if it licensed its operating system to other companies willing to make less expensive boxes.
Apple could have been insanely successful had it licensed its OS out early... say, 1986. Back then, people were paying huge premiums to buy Macs. Apple was making something like 40% margin... that's just crazy. (Compare with Dell; Dell was making 8.8% in 2005, and less than that now.) What Apple could have done was license out their software, and they would have buried Microsoft. (Windows was a total and complete joke in 1986.) But to bury Microsoft, they would have to operate on the Microsoft model: make a little bit on a tremendous volume.
Instead, Apple simply jacked up prices as high as they could. Then, in 1990, Windows stopped being a joke and started being adequate. (Adequate and cheap wins against better and expensive.) This is why Apple nearly died: the world standardized on the adequate-and-cheap Windows, and the overpriced Mac became a difficult sales proposition.
Apple's whole strategy today is to sell polished, nice products at high-enough margins to make good money. They aren't getting anything like 40% anymore but I'll bet they are getting a lot more than Dell. They are basically the BMW of the computer industry. (Microsoft would probably be Ford and Honda together in the car analogy, only with less quality.)
If Apple were to license out their software stack to clone makers now, it would fail. You can be BMW, or you can make a little bit on a large volume, but you can't try to do both at once. And the computer market is too mature now for them to suddenly take over a large chunk of it.
Darwin is not very open-source
The Darwin source code is made available under the APSL, which is OSI-approved.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
allowing mp3 on the iPod, and then lock you into the formats they want you to like
Near as I can tell, after using iTunes since 2002 and an iPod since 2005, there is no such thing as lock-in on the platform. The only pain I've ever felt was using up machine authorizations on stuff bought from the iTunes store, and I quickly fixed that problem by freely stopping my purchases and freely taking my business somewhere else. Later Apple themselves fixed that problem by offering DRM-free material, which is great, but my buying habits have migrated elsewhere and there's no punishment from Apple.
The iTunes store certainly encourages purchase of a large class of their material in a locked format. But there's no punishment for operating outside of that, and it's really not even particularly difficult to unlock the DRM'd stuff.
Tweet, tweet.
I have recently switched to Leopard and Xtools was on the disk. If you want to use KDE etc. you can. Once you have MacPorts running you can use most Gnu stuff. I think that MacPorts is better than Fink for getting all the Gnu stuff running but that is because I prefer an easy life.
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.